Avoiding Enterprise Project Failures

Judith M. Myerson, a systems and architect engineer, discusses enterprise project failures and talks about some solutions. She includes Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) applications and web services as a supplement to EAI as examples.

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Introduction

Projects are no longer regarded as isolated units, but are interrelated to
one another within an enterprise and between enterprises for two reasons:

Increasing complexity of globally distributed networks

Demands of highly competitive markets for faster and more efficient
deliveries and uninterrupted replenishment of high-quality products for less
cost to targeted points of the networks

When economic times are good and the enterprise's balance sheets show
profits, project failures are less of a concern because the enterprise can
absorb the overhead costs of failures. Current times, however, are not so
favorable. Many large enterprisesrepresenting industries from healthcare
to telecommunicationsare faced with tighter budgets due to changing market
and economic conditions, and narrower choice of resources and capital
investments in humans, machines, technologies, and business processes. To
survive, some enterprises have reorganized, merged, and/or downsized to the
point of laying off loyal, long-time managers and workers, and then focusing on
scarcer resources to avoid repeating past project mistakes and to provide more
cost-effective project solutions.